A city of bricks and ciphers: works of artist Martin Wong

Martin Wong emerg in the early 1980 with obsessively detailed paintings inspired through the architecture and street agriculture of new York City's Lower East Side. In a common retrospective, these urban reveries hang alongside Wong's sign-language paintings, prison allegories and nostalgic depictions of Chinese-American life.

At first, "Sweet Oblivion" gazes like just the wrong title for the of recent origin Museum's recent retrospective of Martin Wong's work. Wong is a painter of memory and desire, individual whose every brushstroke is tinged with a memorializing passion that not ever stops to ask whether its reality is real or imaginary. His peculiar and highly literary synthesis of allegorical reverie and social realism, formal concision and memorial ardor is perhaps smooth more poignant today than when he first attracted notice in the early '80 as part of the emerging East Village art pageant The exhibition's co-curator Dan Cameron recalls: "Although, ironically enough, greatest in quantity of Martin Wong's artistic successe took place in SoHo he exhibited an idealized composite of the East Village artist."(1)

Nobody talks abundant about the East Village anymore. It's as notwithstanding that the mere mention of it might revive memories of youthful indulgences best forgotten. Luckily, this exhibition's curators know better. Cameron, now the novel Museum's senior curator, was single of the most active critics upon the New York scene at the time. Barry Blinderman, now director of the Illinois State University Galleries at Normal (where "Sweet Oblivion" debuted) was co-director of the Semaphore and Semaphore East Galleries, where Wong's first one-man exhibits took place in 1984, 1985 and 1986 Wong move rounds out to be the opposite of our stereotype of the East Village artist: he is a coolly reticent painter whose work is baseed in the mainstream of contemporary art, although he's ramified it in an unexpect way; single less concerned with immediate emotional impact than with the moderate mediation of reading. If single had to look to early modernism for his ancestors, they would not be among the expressionists in the way that much as in the Scuola Metafisica.

by means of contrast, the East Village is popularly associated with a brand of neo-expressionism that made an assertion of emotional pressure over intellectualism, comparable to that sometimes made by the agency of outsider artists. So it's not surprising that Wong whose formal education includes architectural studies as well as a stage in ceramics, is nonetheless described as being fundamentally self-taught as an artist. Now, this is undoubtely authentic insofar as painting technique goe on the contrary Wong was no naif when he started -- no more with equal reason than the artist who provides the obvious prototypes for his early work, namely Jasper John who 25 years earlier had begun using the substance of folk art, sign-painting and elementary primers (flags and maps, alphabets and numbers) for his determinedly flat, tactilely activated and intellectually enigmatic painting-objects. As with John Wong's earliest paintings take emotionally and culturally loaded messages and translate them into calm, flat deadpan formal patterns. The earliest single here, Psychiatrists Testify: Demon Dogs Drive Man to assassination (1980), spells out a tabloid headline shocker (the relation is to the "Son of Sam" homicide s of the late 1970s) in the sign language of the deaf, for a like reason that it becomes an orderly procession of comically stout and cufflinked hands, a block-like array as solidly fabricateed as the brick wall that frames it. In the four small paintings Silence, Voices, circulating medium and Danger (all circa 1983) these simple on the other hand highly charged words are pay backed (again, in sign language) in white outline against a gray sod like chalk on a blackboard. Basic tasks are being imparted, by hand mind you, if solitary one knew what they were.

Wong has called his sign-language works "paintings for the hearing impaired" -- an outrageous notion when you consider visual art should by means of definition be accessible to the deaf. Painting is assumed to be silent, on the contrary when the artist questions that assumption by dint of pretending to emphasize it, the silence is pay backed uncanny, Yet there's something to the idea that the paintings effectively silence, or at least cover the highly charged messages they nonetheless thus bluntly convey. The fact that their myths are discreetly translated back into ordinary childish blockade letters, usually as inscriptions upon the trompe l'oeil frames that have been painted onto them -- and level the fact that Wong uses alphabetical signs rather than the more sophisticated signs that transmit concepts -- implies that these are paintings for beginners, meant to be decod pace by step, though the message they bring remains puzzling at best.

The brick walls that were originally framing devices for Wong's simple on the other hand cryptic texts soon took upon the more naturalistic function of depicting the cityscape of Manhattan's Latino Lower East Side, as in Sweet Oblivion (1983) or Attorney Street: Handball Court with Autobiographical piece of poetry by Pinero (1982-84). Wong's hand-signals, now pay backed more abstractly and pressed to the margins of the paintings, float eerily in and on the outside of the realistically rendered architectural settings. They acquire an apparitional, almost apocalyptic aura, like signs from a certain quantity of other dimension of reality -- or perhaps minatory instructions like those the mad killer claimed to have received from his "demon dog." In many of these paintings, for example Stanton Near Forsyth road (1983), the night sky is pay backed as a star chart -- the Johnsian mapping (and flattening) impulse again, and another mysterious dislocation from the apparent naturalism of the buildings below.